When I was researching our situation with late blight I came across some intriguing information that I was wholly unaware of. But first a couple announcements:
We are still taking orders for albacore tuna! This is not the stuff that comes in a can. This is wild, line-caught, delicious sushi-quality tuna! All sustainably caught. We need your order by the end of the month. $85 gets you five pounds at the end of September!
Seafood and Salmon arrive on Thursday afternoon!
No Fruit, Meat, Eggs, Cheese, Coffee or Ice Cream this week.
Now back to the important late blight information:
I’m sure you music aficionados are tuned into this but I was not. Did you know there are many songs inspired by late blight? Who knew? The first one I came across was a Bob Dylan tune. Yes. It is true. You see Bob was an avid gardener and grew potatoes in his back yard. One season his potatoes suddenly died. He was mystified and so contacted the UofM Plant Pathology Lab and brought in a sample. They diagnosed late blight. When he asked, “Where did this disease come from? I rotate my crops. I keep the weeds down. I do everything to ensure a wonderful growing environment. How can I possibly have late blight? Where did it come from?” The response he got was, “The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.” And most people think it is a war protest song. Surprising…
Speaking of Bob Dylan, these times they are a-changin’ here on the farm. So it is time to update everyone on what we are up to these days.
First, we have harvested all the garlic, cured it in the curing chamber and started processing it to hand out to our members. If we can keep up we will be giving out garlic just about every week for the rest of the season. For those people keeping score at home, the variety we gave out last week was Chesnok Red.
Second, we harvested all the onions and they too are curing in their own curing chamber. The purpose of curing onions is similar to curing garlic in that we want the tops to dry back and “seal” the bulb from unwanted pathogens. We found the greenhouse works well for the onions since their tops have more moisture than garlic tops. The solar heat in the greenhouse warms the outside air brought in by the exhaust fan. This sets up a nice situation where the air around the onions is relatively dry thus increasing the evaporation out of the plant and drying it faster. If we didn’t have the exhaust fan on drawing in cooler outside air the temperature would get too hot and cook the onions. I suppose maybe some of you would pay extra for the convenience of pre-cooked onions. One last onion note, there are two types of onions – storage onions and sweet onions. Sweet onions are less pungent when eaten raw but less sweet when cooked. Storage onions are very strong when eaten raw but when cooked they caramelize to a far sweeter flavor than sweet onions. Sweet onions have a shorter storage life than storage onions. So far we have only given out sweet onions. They can be used both raw and cooked. Stay tuned to the newsletter to learn when we switch to storage onions (probably late September or so).
We’ve also harvested the last of the sweet corn. This most recent variety is called xtra tender. If you have too much I would highly recommend freezing it. Nothing better than the taste of summer in the middle of winter. The last of the corn will be given out this week.
We are done with both the fennel and spring beets. We have more beets growing for the fall so don’t fear running out of beets (this seems to be the year of the beet).
We are letting the tomatoes continue to grow to see if we can get more fruit off of them. The original plan was to pull them out and burn the debris. We’ve found some of the plants are surviving the late blight attack. So we will leave them and harvest what we can. I figured we are getting about 10% of what we’d expect to get from them – not very good yield, but at least we are getting something. It takes us longer to harvest those tomatoes as well since we have to look fairly closely at every fruit. We will try our best to not send out blight infested tomatoes but there is no guarantee. Just keep an eye on them and use them as soon as they are ripe.
We also harvested a bunch of the potatoes today. Prior to getting the blight our potato plants looked incredibly healthy. The result is that there are plenty of tubers underground – at least in the rows we dug today. With one variety – Nicola – we are getting close to 20:1 yields! So for ever pound we planted we are getting 20 pounds in return. We planted 50 lbs of this variety so we should get around 1000 lbs! Hope you like potatoes! Now this doesn’t mean every variety will do this well and I speculate that later season varieties may have much lower yields since the tubers start growing later in the summer. Because the plants may have died before the tubers grew large the yields will be lower. This is purely speculative on my part but scientifically it makes sense. In any case, these potatoes may have blight so again keep an eye on them and dispose of any that start to rot.
Those are the larger projects we’ve been working on lately. Now, what will we have in our shares this week? Certainly potatoes! Plus carrots, cucumbers, beans, peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, chard, kale, some squash (it’s winding down), a few eggplants, and who knows what else we might find out in the fields. We’ll throw in some herbs as well, just have to figure out which ones…
As always do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, concerns, speculations, jokes, brain teasers, random thoughts, extra hundred dollar bills, and questions.