I recently became aware of one huge benefit of being Farmer Chris and a newsletter writer. When a newsletter joke falls flat the threat of physical violence is minimized compared to those Chrises who partake in the in-person joke telling professions. Stay safe out there fellow Chris jokers. And always remember paper beats Rock.
And now a few announcements:
We are still taking orders for VeggieShares! We had a great week last week and went from 70% to 82% of shares sold so lets keep up the great work. And if you plan to join please do so soon.
Don’t forget to tell your friends and earn a $25 credit for every one who joins at your insistence. Have them put your name in the “Where did you hear about us?’ box on the order form.
We have hired a couple of great employees for the 2022 season but could use another full time or two part time people. Get off your lazy butt and come make some mad stacks of cash growing delicious veggies! (Well maybe not mad stacks but exercise is included). Or of course tell someone else to do so.
Final payment is due for those who put down a deposit, unless you chose Payment Plan. Send in your payment via mail or PayPal — your choice. Let me know if you have any questions.
Farm News
This time of year farm activities start picking up giving me far less time to attend Congressional cocaine fueled sex orgies. It is a sacrifice I am willing to make for our farm members nutritional needs. Plus by now the travel really starts getting to me. Anyway, most of what I do now is related to planting in the greenhouse and fixing farm equipment. If I had a nicely heated garage I would work on the tractors in December and January but since I do not I have to wait until the garage is a least at a temperature where fingers no longer freeze to metal parts. We’ve finally reached that temperature and of course there are a lot of things to fix.
In the greenhouse I’ve been planting and planting and planting. So much so that I had to buy another pallet of planting mix. So far I have planted onions, shallots, green onions, leeks, Brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli (two successions so far), cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi, fennel, beets, Swiss chard, oregano, thyme, curly parsley, flat parsley, sage, lemon balm, lettuce, hot peppers, tomatoes for the hoop house, and a number of different flowers I can’t recall. This week and into next I will be planting peppers, eggplants, and more hot peppers. Then sometime in the next week or two I will be grafting the tomatoes. I’m pretty excited about that. I hope it works.
Speaking of hoping it works, you probably recall that this year and last we’ve been heat treating our seeds to reduce the disease pressure on our plants. It seems this year the germination rate of the heat treated seeds is widely inconsistent. Some types and varieties of seeds germinate in the 90%+ range, which is typical of most seeds when not heat treating. But others are closer to 50%, and one variety of onions was less than 10%. It doesn’t seem to correlate to anything in particular, like say seed type or age of the seed. Some seeds do great. Others less so. I have 15 year old tomato seeds that were above 90% germination and brand new tomato seeds that were around 60%. This makes it quite tricky to get the right number of plants we are targeting. If we plants extra seeds in anticipation of reduced germination we find we end up with extra plants that take up extra space, plus we waste the seed if we don’t use the plant. If we reduce the number of extra seeds we plant for a given variety we find this particular variety inevitably has germination problems. Makes for a trying planting process. So this season we will pay particularly close attention to whether this extra effort reduces our disease issues. If not, we may forgo the heat treating in the future.
Finally, last week I discussed my ideas for daylight savings time. At the end of that newsletter I hinted at a great idea for making three day weekends permanent. Here is my idea: Instead of the traditional seven day week, we instead have an eight day week where we still have the same five day work week but we follow it with a three day weekend. Companies still get their five days of work out of each employee every week and each employee gets a three day weekend. Genius! Call your Congressperson and lets get this bill passed, if you can get them away from the cocaine and sex orgy.
All this sex talk reminded me of the Fresh Earth Films video from many years ago. It still makes me laugh.
Here is the link if the video below doesn’t work: https://youtu.be/TWVKGpoAJXc
As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, and any slap worthy jokes.