Farming doesn’t always go well. More on this below. In the mean time, here are this week’s announcements.
What can we expect in the shares this week? As always, a very good question. We will have green beans, yellow beans, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, fennel, kohlrabi, zucchini, summer squash, onions, garlic scapes, cucumbers, eggplants and quite possibly cabbage. We may harvest some chard and basil as well. Sometime in the next week or so we will start harvesting sweet corn! I think we are entering the summer veggie season!
Fresh Earth Farms First Annual Fall Film Fest and Potluck Dinner. This is your weekly reminder about the upcoming member event. We want to make this an extra special event celebrating our “Spinal Tap” season. It would be very helpful to know who is coming. I realize it is over a month away but planning an event like this is like planning a wedding reception. We really need to know as early as possible how many people will be attending. This will help us determine what size tent to get, how many tables to rent, etc. The date is Saturday, September 7th. We will harvest potatoes during the day starting at 2:00. Dinner will begin around 5:00 with the film fest to follow once the sun goes down. You don’t have to attend the whole day. So please RSVP ASAP. I’d especially love to see some of our drop site members out here; there are quite a few of you I haven’t met yet. And if you find any good films send them my way. They do not have to be your own; anything fun or interesting on the internet works as long as it is appropriate for viewing by children and is under six minutes in length.
OtherShares: This week we have SalmonShare, CheeseShare, FruitShare, EggShare, and FlowerShare.
ShroomShare: Last call for ShroomShare. Please let me know if you are interested in local, certified organic oyster mushrooms. We are close to our minimum order size but need a few more people to sign up. We have two sizes: Large is 8 oz every other week for a total of six deliveries. Small is 4 oz every other week for six deliveries. Price is $48 and $27 respectively. Please let me know ASAP if you’d like to add delicious shrooms!
Ice Cream: Anyone for some delicious, certified organic ice cream from grass fed cows? We are carrying Castle Rock Ice Cream for delivery in two weeks. Please let me know if you’d like to order some. Details are in last week’s newsletter.
Farm Happenings
Farming doesn’t always go well. This is not a sentence one likes as the first sentence of a farm newsletter. But we live in a place called reality and in reality things sometimes go wrong. We farmers are lucky though. We always have a built in excuse – Mother Nature. With our dependency on Mother Nature we can always fall back on her as the cause of our failures.
A failure we had last Friday may or may not have been caused by Mother Nature. It all started on a bright, warm July morning. The temperature was already in the high eighties as we finished the harvesting and started washing the produce and packing the boxes. As I was weighing the carrots to go into the delivery shares I started noticing there was ice in the carrots. This seemed odd to me and I made a mental note and engaged my subconscious mind to figure out what caused this. I would have used my conscious mind but it was otherwise occupied with other work activities.
Once I finished weighing the carrots I went back to the cooler to find the next item for the boxes. When I entered the cooler I happened to look at the evaporator – the device inside the cooler that dispenses the coldness into the cooler and extracts the hotness out. The evaporator was covered in frost. My subconscious mind elbowed my conscious mind and said, “Hey dummy, this is not usual. Maybe this is the cause of the ice in the carrots.” At that point I thought, “This is not usual. Maybe this is the cause of the ice in the carrots.” Then my conscious mind made my mouth utter a word not fit for print.
I turned up the temperature in the cooler to defrost the evaporator and proceeded to unload all the crates of produce for inspection. It must not have been in this state for long since it didn’t take long to defrost. But it was long enough to cause some damage to susceptible items. The primary victim was the lettuce. We had about 100 heads of lettuce we had harvested earlier in the week figuring it would keep better in the comfy cool confines of the cooler than the scorching heat of the outdoors. Since lettuce doesn’t like heat this seemed like a great way to keep it from bolting and provide our members one last chance at lettuce. Well, that backfired. All except for maybe three heads were damaged beyond salvaging. We fed the frosty lettuce to the chickens who seemed to enjoy it but eventually tired of it. Forty chickens cannot consume 100 heads of lettuce.
Other victims were the squash and zucchinis. They became discolored from the cold. This probably indicated some level of damage so we didn’t want to risk giving them out. We put those in the free bin in the tent. For the most part they turned out ok but the parts that were severely discolored eventually shriveled.
Pretty much everything else survived. I suspect it had to do with its location in the cooler and its susceptibility to freezing temperatures. If anyone received produce that seemed to spoil faster than normal please let me know. I’d like to know if other items were damaged undetectably.
Now the bigger question is why did the cooler malfunction? If we have any HVAC or refrigeration folks as members please let me know if you have any answers. The cooler has run since the incident without further difficulties so I am hoping it was just a freak episode. My hypothesis is that it was a hot day with high humidity and we were loading the cooler with wet produce and walking in and out a lot. This caused the compressor to run excessively and with the high humidity the moisture condensed and turned to frost on the evaporator. This would explain the frost but the part I’m missing is why the temperature dropped below freezing in the cooler. Wouldn’t the thermostat signal the condenser to stop running once the set point is reached? My conjecture here is since the thermostat is near the door the temperature near the thermostat never fell below the set point. I suppose this could have caused the problem as well but the thermostat has been in the same place since it was installed over ten years ago and we never had this problem before. The most likely reason is Mother Nature. She seems to be the cause of most of our problems.