This is a rare Wednesday edition of our weekly newsletter. Yesterday was too busy to get it done with the garlic harvesting, the carrot digging and the hay stacking. Luckily I had time off from 10:00 pm yesterday until 7:00 am today to catch up on the eating and sleeping part of life. Hopefully this day will end a little earlier.
I sent everyone an evite to the First Annual Fresh Earth Farms Fall Film Fest. It was sent to your email we have on file. If you did not receive it please let me know and we will figure out if we have an incorrect email address. Also for those of you sharing a box please forward it to other people in your group. Or have them send me an email and I will add them to the invite list. Or include them in the total attending so we can have a reasonably accurate count. We’ve had a good response so far. We’d like to see as many of you as possible out here that day; come for all of it or just part of it. The forecast calls for perfect weather (though you know how fickle weather can be) and no mosquitoes!
Prepare for an onslaught of eggplant! There are a couple of recipes on our web site plus I noticed there are a few on our Pinterest page as well. With the squash, tomatoes, onions and thyme you should be able to make a pretty good ratatouille. There is also a really good eggplant recipe on this newsletter from last season.
What else besides eggplant will we have? Well, we have a LOT of stuff this week. I hope you are all hungry. We have sweet corn, carrots, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, beans, squash, onions, cucumbers, kohlrabi, fennel, broccoli, basil, and thyme for ratatouille and cilantro and hot peppers for salsa. Since this newsletter is late you can see this week’s produce here though the delivery boxes do not include everything on the above list.
SalmonShare comes on Monday
ShroomShare comes on Monday as well.
CoffeeShare arrived on this past Monday. Plan to pick up your coffee at the usual place and time.
No Cheese, Fruit or Meat this week.
What is happening at the farm? Lots of stuff. Most of our time this time of year is spent harvesting. It is the peak of the season, which will continue to peak until the frost kills the summer crops. We’re also planting fall crops, planting winter cover crops, spraying for pests (organic only!), and some weeding/cultivating though the intense weed germination is behind us. The weather has been near ideal for growing (and more importantly, working outside). Though the cooler nights slow down the ripening of some of the heat loving crops it also prolongs the cool loving crops like broccoli. Every year we plant several successions of broccoli. The idea is that if all goes well we will have six to eight weeks f broccoli. Inevitably the third planting doesn’t do well due to the heat of the summer. Not this year. Our best broccoli is now heading up. The first succession never got planted with the extremely late spring. The second planting never headed up very well — still not sure why. This third planting looks fabulous, as does the fall planting that is now about a foot tall. So sometimes the bet pays off. Now if we could get the most magnificent looking cauliflower plants to form heads.
We also started harvesting our garlic. I am disappointed in the size of the bulbs this year. Maybe it is due to the late spring. Maybe it is due to the sunspot cycle. Whatever the reason, the garlic just isn’t the size I would like it to be. It is still garlic and still tastes great, but bigger would have been better.
Well, that is enough for now. Have to get back to farming. Please RSVP to the evite and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc. do not hesitate to contact me.