{"id":5073,"date":"2016-01-04T12:47:22","date_gmt":"2016-01-04T12:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/?p=5073"},"modified":"2016-04-07T12:48:11","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T12:48:11","slug":"a-note-from-farmer-will-jan-4th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/a-note-from-farmer-will-jan-4th\/","title":{"rendered":"A note from farmer will: Jan 4th"},"content":{"rendered":"Dear CSA Members,\r\n\r\nI hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season! It has been very\u00a0cold this week on the farm. The temperature dropped down to 30 degrees this\u00a0morning.\r\n\r\nWhen we get a chill like this, something interesting happens in the\u00a0garden: I like to say that the plants \u2018go to sleep\u2019. The leaves of the less frost resistant varieties such as our fava beans and arugula seem to gain a deep dark green\u00a0color, they droop down, sag and look lifeless. The very first time I witnessed this,\u00a0I thought, \u201cOh no, there goes the entire crop...\u201d but as soon as the sun peeks out\u00a0from beneath the adjacent fields and falls on the leaves, the intricate patterns of\u00a0frost crystals melt away and the plants regain their former vitality. This show of\u00a0resiliency is a beautiful thing to witness.\r\n\r\nWhile everything is growing so very slowly, we have a lot of time to\u00a0devote to researching new crops and cultivars, and generally thinking up new\u00a0ways to innovate our production methods. Two days ago, after an entire week of\u00a0planning and researching, we finally ordered seeds for summer. We are going to\u00a0be growing more beautiful heirloom tomatoes, crunchy peppers, pie pumpkins,\u00a0and eggplant. Part of innovating and staying inspired for us, not only as growers\u00a0but also as eaters, is trying out new varietiesof crops that we already love, but we\u00a0haven\u2019t yet grown.\r\n\r\nBefore the advent of industrial agriculture, when crops were grown in\u00a0backyards and on small family farms, heirloom varieties were much more widely\u00a0cultivated. Over time, these varieties have been abandoned due to lack of an ability to be shipped far distances without being damaged, or lack of compatibility\u00a0with farm mechanization or lack of uniformity in their size, shape or growth\u00a0habit, which is important for large scale automated packing or processing.\r\n\r\nHere at Frog Hollow, because we do many things by hand and on a\u00a0smaller scale we are able to grow these old, forgotten varieties. Aside from contributing to the biodiversity on the farm and preserving the cultural heritage of\u00a0these lost varieties, these forgotten plants typically have some of the best flavors.\r\n\r\nFor us, as eaters, this is not only rewarding for the palate, but for our hearts and\u00a0minds as well.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear CSA Members, I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season! It has been very\u00a0cold this week on the farm. The temperature dropped down to 30 degrees this\u00a0morning. When we get a chill like this, something interesting happens in the\u00a0garden: I like to say that the plants \u2018go to sleep\u2019. The leaves of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-note-from-farmer-al"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-1jP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5073"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5074,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073\/revisions\/5074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}