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Hutten Family Farm Newsletter for Sunday Jan 1, 2012

     Happy new year. Hopefully 2012 will be filled with lots of joy and good health. It was great to have some time off work to spend with my own family and our extended family as well. I hope that everyone had some opportunity to do the same with the people close to you. Many of our CSA members have been away for the last couple of weeks visiting with family in other areas of Canada and around the world. I've noticed several accounts returning 'active' over the last days as people return home. Welcome back.
     We will start the new year with some really mild weather again. This should help to keep some type of greens in the CSA boxes on most weeks during the winter months. The next six or seven weeks are the most difficult. This is primarily because of the short amount of day length right now; not so much because of the temperature. I still have some aphids in the heated greenhouse (sigh) but they seem to be getting less. The beneficial insects (predators) that we introduced seem to be winning.
     We continue to plant micro salad greens each week. These will be our only seeding efforts until mid February when we will try to increase the selection of winter/spring green offerings. I feel that the short days make other crops too challenging for seeding right now. Spinach and mache and arugula that were planted in late fall continue to grow in cold frames but I would not seed them this month.
     Our supply of root vegetables and cabbages and kale is still fairly good. Winter squash is the only real downer because of the wet spring we had. I might have enough for one more week of squash in the boxes but I'm not sure. Once we hit the end of February you can eat spinach salad until you hate it. You might even have to eat it after you hate it. It will make us all better people. Or maybe just cranky people.
     This year I want to grow a bunch of dry beans. I say this most years and usually run out of time/energy/ambition/interest before planting time. I need to make a positive change in my life. Maybe dry beans is the answer. My brother Bill (older brother) made a funny salad thing with beans and maybe lentils and stuff in it for Christmas dinner. At first I refused to eat it because it didn't look quite right but then I changed my mind. It was very good and now I want to grow some kind of dry beans. 
     I'm going to bed now; it's crazy late.          ted

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