Hi everyone,
Thank you so much for joining the CSA Club for our third season! We’re thrilled to share a summer of fresh, delicious veggies with you.
We’re grateful to welcome back returning members and excited to meet so many new faces. Let’s take a moment to introduce the team making this season possible:
We started Gard Mo in 2023 after spending a couple of years dreaming and scheming about ways to improve the local food infrastructure. We both have a background in food science and have worked for large consumer packaged good companies as product developers, but have grown to believe that supporting local growers is the route to a more just, sustainable, and delicious food system. I (Ben) do most of the day-to-day things for Gard Mo while Lisa carries more than her weight coordinating our zero-waste efforts, stepping in wherever needed, and holding down a full-time job to support us.
Our new CSA Club Production Assistant, Ana, is indispensable this season. From prepping and packing veggies to cleaning totes and containers, her help ensures everything reaches you on time—we couldn’t do it without her!
This project thrives because of you, enabling us to build a community around eating local. From our multi-season members to the new ones; your trust in us to deliver the freshest local harvest is what makes this all possible. Our long-term vision is to grow Gard Mo into a cooperatively owned and managed business, and we’re already seeing incredible momentum. We’ve been incredibly lucky to have a group of CSA Club members (Jenny, Dylan, and Kyra) helping us dream up what a Gard Mo cooperative could look like—and what it would mean to be a member-owner. The conversation has expanded to the wider CSA Club community through member dinners we’ve hosted, and members have already been stepping up to pitch-in (Catherine, Nancy, and Marc). Our goal is to keep this momentum going through the season, deepening and growing the community. Potluck picnics, a recipe-sharing forum, and a co-op study group are just some of the ideas we have for doing that. We’re so excited for you all to be part of the CSA Club and to be part of this exciting phase of growth for us.
For us, this journey has been fun, sometimes exhausting, and deeply transformative. Most of all, it’s been incredibly rewarding to connect with so many amazing people. We’re excited for another season and can’t wait to see how much we’ll grow together!
We hope you all enjoy the veggies, and don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or feedback!
—Ben
Another storage item from Nichols, this a pretty fun one and easy to make. Just put a full cob into a large paper bag and use the popcorn setting on your microwave (3.5 oz, ~1.5 mins). If you’d rather, you can always break the kernels off the cob and pop on the stove top like you otherwise would. Season with some Cherry Bomb Pepper or Green Garlic Salt.
This is spring-planted spinach (vs overwintered). The weather to start this season has been a bit cooler than last year allowing Nichols keep spinach going out in the field without it bolting. The flavor is deeply spinach-y and has a nice sweet balance. It’s definitely hardier than baby spinach and would hold up well to a sauté.
The scale that Nichols is at enables them to harvest enough storage crops in the fall to last through all of winter. These sunchokes are one of those storage crops, harvested last fall but still tasting great. Sunchokes are starchy root similar to potato, and can be used similarly. Roasted until tender is always nice. A favorite, but laborious, of mine is to make sunchoke chips to use as a gorgeous crunchy topping for a salad.
Nichols’ arugula is always extra peppery. You’ll often see arugula used in light salads, like with balsamic and goat cheese. But these ones are so peppery I had visions of it carrying a creamy Caesar dressing making it seem like you gave it a few extra cranks of the pepper mill.
Spring onions are always a treat. Harvested before a bulb has started to form, these look more like scallions and can be used similarly. Use the bottom red and white portions the same way you would onion (diced and sautéed at the beginning of any dish), and the top green portion like you would green onion or chives (as a garnish).
We’re starting off the season with a double ration of radishes. Easter egg radishes are typically a mix of different varieties of radishes which is how we end up with the pretty mix of purple, pinks, and whites. These ones from Otter Oaks are particularly sweet and mild.
These are the fingerlings of radishes. Skinny and long, they look nice thinly sliced into cute little discs or quartered for something like radish home fries.
Over the winter, Nichols Farm added a couple greenhouses to their already impressive amount. In these greenhouses, they plant directly into the earth giving them the both the protection of a greenhouse and the amazing soil they have cultivated over many seasons. With this, they are able to perform the magic act of having cucumbers and tomatoes available in the middle of May.
