By predicting that the weather would be unpredictable, we seem to have predicted the weather perfectly. It's been bouncing from one extreme to another, hardly ever qualifying as "seasonal." The cold, wet spring, about which I had been complaining earlier, gave us its last precipitation as a covering of snow on April 18th. Then, for the next four and a half weeks, not another drop of precipitation fell and we found ourselves suffering through a cold, dry spring. It was amazingly dry and it was unseasonably cold except for the three days of record heat in the first week of May. Though temperatures have remained on the cool side since that mini drought ended, we've had some rain and some sun, and that makes the plants happy.

Now that the CSA season is underway, I hope you're appreciating our Distribution Managers, those stalwart members who volunteer to make the pick-up days a more pleasurable and more educational experience for all the other members. Besides answering your immediate questions, they will provide a convenient channel of communication between the CSA members and the farm staff, so please feel free to speak your mind to them. They hope to collect enough comments to fill a "Heard in the Garden" column in future newsletters. (For anonymous comments, we will have a "Suggestion" box available in the barn.)

To provide you with new ideas for using our foods, the Distribution Managers have offered to create sample dishes from a weekly "Featured Recipe" that highlights vegetables in season that week. The recipes will be available all week (and longer), but the sample dishes will only be available one day a week, rotating through Monday, Wednesday and Friday. With more Distribution Managers, we could have treats available on more pick-up days. Given all their other volunteer responsibilities at Maysie's Farm, not to mention the rest of their lives, it's amazing that Amy Bruckner, Mary Ann Byrne, Colleen Cranney, Dawn Lawless and Annegret Goetze are able to cover the sixteen hours of pick-up time (plus prep time and clean up time). They could certainly use some additional help.

These same volunteers, and others, are working to expand the educational programs offered by Maysie's Farm Conservation Center. We've scheduled four "Down to Earth Gardening" workshops this summer to allow kids to experience the whole food growing process in a few hours (as described elsewhere in this Newsletter). We are arranging a variety of adult and family programs, some of which will be held at the farm and some of which will be presented at the beautiful facilities of Camphill Soltane, about a mile and a half from the farm.

On the Summer Solstice, Thursday, June 21st, we will be presenting a workshop on "Starting a CSA" which is being promoted by FarmLink and our good friends at PASA (The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture). If you know of any people — consumers, landowners, community organizers, would-be farmers — interested in establishing a CSA, bring them out to the farm around 7:00 that evening. In fact, I would say that if you know of anyone interested in starting a CSA, it's your civic duty to see that that person attends the workshop.

Because if we don't exert some effort into maintaining control of at least a small segment of the food system, our entire food system will be controlled by those few corporations which now control most of it. And do you want the food on your table to be produced by a system dedicated to maximizing the corporate bottom line regardless of the costs to the consumer?

Here's a thought to ponder: do you know why high fructose corn syrup, a processed sugar, and partially hydrogenated soy bean oil, that substance that the progressive medical community recognizes as a toxin, are in practically every box of food on supermarket shelves? It's because agribusiness became so successful forty or fifty years ago in producing corn and soybeans that they had to develop new markets for them. We don't want those products in our foods, they're not good for us, but they're there because the bottom lines of the corporations that control our food system demand that they be there.

If you can't grow your own food, you can go to the supermarket or you can join a CSA. If there's not a CSA nearby, you can go to the supermarket or you can get a CSA started. I'll help; it's my civic duty.