First a few announcements:
Ever had an urge to spend a gorgeous fall afternoon planting 1,000s of cloves of garlic? Well here is your opportunity! Our Garlic Planting Gala is scheduled for October 4th from 1:00 to 5:00 with dinner and bonfire to follow. We have a few victims, er, volunteers already signed-up but could use a couple hundred more. Please let me know if you are planning on enjoying this wonderful activity with us this year. There are many activities for every ability! (Plus some great food at the end). One of the activities is spreading the straw mulch on the garlic. Here is a picture of me in my Lando Calrissian outfit standing on the three bales of straw to give you perspective. As you can see there is a LOT of straw to be spread! So don’t be shy about coming out to help!
We started giving out WinterShares last week. They will be delivered to drop sites as well. So far we have the garlic, onions, shallots and squash packed and ready to go. The potatoes will follow once we dig them out of the ground. On-farm members be sure to ask for your share if your purchased one. If you haven’t purchased one but would like to please let me know and we can set one aside. The price is $95 for a full share; $50 for a half. A full share includes 20# potatoes, 20# winter squash, 5# onions, 2# garlic and 2# shallots. A half is half of that.
We will be taking orders for next season starting as soon as I get an order form put together.
Though the veggies will end next month other delicious foods don’t have to. Please let me know if you are interested in winter FruitShare, CheeseShare and/or MeatShare. We’ve done these in the past and will do so again this winter if we have enough interest!
Farm stuff
There are still five weeks left in the season. We have a lot of veggies left to give out including but not limited to cabbage, beets, Brussels sprouts, kale, leeks, potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, onions, garlic, bok choi, broccoli, cauliflower, napa cabbage, fennel, kohlrabi, salad mix, peppers, beans, and diakon radishes.
The tomatoes for the most part are done for the season. We have a few left in storage but they will be gone one way or another by the end of this week. So this is as good of a time as any to reflet on our tomato cage experiment this year.
As you may recall, we spent some bucks this season to assemble cages to hold our tomato plants. In past years we used various systems to keep the tomatoes off the bare ground; none were what I would consider a success. What is my definition of success? Good quality tomatoes, with reasonably high yields that are easy to harvest and not time consuming to grow. Oh, and it would be helpful if the solution was cheap. Up to this year nothing met those criteria. Some solutions didn’t work well at all (the weave). Some solutions worked marginally (plastic mesh trellis). Some solutions were wasteful (plastic mulch). Others were time consuming with little added benefit (straw mulch). Others were extremely expensive and still were time consuming (hoop house with hanging twine and clips). All in all we were disappointed, until this year.
The cages we built worked very well on many of our criteria. They provided good quality tomatoes (on par with the hoop house). The yields from the cages significantly exceeded the tomatoes grown without cages. We could quickly harvest hundreds of pounds of tomatoes from the cages in a matter of an hour or two with less stooping and easier walking. The two drawbacks are cost and the labor necessary to erect the cages and the time to train the plants to stay within the cages. We found it took 30 to 45 minutes twice per week per row to push the plants back into the cages. This would be about 4 hours per week devoted just to training with a fully caged tomato system. We stopped training the plants once they reached the tops of the cages or we ran out of time. So we probably trained them 4-6 weeks during the season. However the time saved during harvest more than made up for the time spent training. Harvest time is more valuable. There is a lot to do during the time of year when tomatoes are ripe and ready. So saving time at that time of year is imperative. The cages overall were in my opinion labor neutral at the least and probably labor positive at best.
The second drawback of the cages is the cost. At about $6/cage our five hundred tomato plants need $3,000 worth of tomato cages. We could get some nice farming equipment for $3,000! However based on our back-of-the-envelop calculations we figure we can plant fewer tomato plants resulting in the same amount of tomatoes — and of higher quality. Thus savings $1,000 or so.
Finally, tomato harvesting in the past was a dreaded reality. Nobody really liked it. We were disappointed in the quality. The work was frustrating (ooo, there is a nice red one, squish, yuck, its rotten on the bottom!) With the cages it was almost a joy to harvest. More importantly it was a pleasure to give them out to our members and feel proud of the quality. The difference was quite obvious in the pick-up tent. A box of caged tomatoes looked immaculate. The non-caged looked sorry at times. We prefer to give out the immaculate kind.
So the bottom line is that we will do all the tomatoes in cages from now on. No more cage-free tomatoes at Fresh Earth Farms.
What will we have this week? With the end of the tomatoes (a few are left which we will give out until they are gone), we will transition into the fall crops starting with pie pumpkins and winter squash. (This might be a good time to mention our soup baked in a pumpkin recipe). We will also have leeks, potatoes, (potato leek soup!) onions, garlic, carrots, beans, peppers, kale, celery (best used in soup, not raw), cabbage, daikon radishes (makes a good soup!), tomatillos and the remaining cherry tomatoes. An abundant, soupy week!
Salmon and Seafood will be available for pick-up Wednesday October 1st.
How do you make soup gold?
Put in fourteen carrots!