We are open the regular time on Labor Day. Deliveries will be made as usual except for the St. Paul Monastery. For on-farm pick-up you can switch to another pick-up day if Labor Day doesn’t work for you. We are open M, W and F from 3:30 to 6:30 and Th from 9:30 to 11:30 am. For Drop-site members if you are unable to pick-up your produce on Labor Day you can switch to any of our on-farm pick-up times, have someone else pick-up your produce or forgo this week’s box by telling us not to pack it. Please let me know if you need to make changes ASAP.
We have scheduled this year’s Garlic Planting for Saturday, October 10th from 2:00 to 5:00 with bonfire and potluck to follow. This is a great opportunity to see the farm, get a little dirty and meet your fellow farm members. It is a lot of fun and the food is delicious. Let me know if you can make it!
Farm Update
As I mentioned in past newsletters, we were hit with Tomato Late Blight. Late blight affects tomatoes and potatoes causing the plants to die fairly quickly. With the potatoes we cut off the plants hoping to save the potato spuds underneath. So far this seems to be working. We haven’t found many spuds with late blight though I suppose it could appear while in storage. In any case, unlike past seasons we are unable to save this year’s potatoes for planting next season — the late blight can remain viable on potatoes. Unfortunately this will result in about $1,000 in extra costs for next season. Not something we typically budget for.
So to cover next season’s extra expense we are running a Seed Potato Fundraiser. Yes, here is yet another fundraiser for the fall season. Add this to your elementary school gift wrap fundraiser, your choir magazine fundraiser, your Boy Scout wreath sale fundraiser, your football merchant card fundraiser and whatever other fundraiser your life imposed upon your free time. How does our Seed Potato Fundraiser work? Well, since we cannot store the seed potatoes from this year’s crop we are going to sell them instead – to you! So the normal 1,000 pounds of potatoes we typically keep we will sell to you our members for the low low price of $1/pound. Half off what co-ops are selling potatoes for at this time of year. So if you like potatoes and the amount we are giving you each week just isn’t enough (our plan is to provide about one pound per share per week for the rest of the season – that would equate to two pounds for a CoupleShare and three pounds for a FamilyShare per week) please consider purchasing extra potatoes from us and help offset next year’s seed potato purchase.
Our biggest dilemma so far this season has reared its ugly head this past week. This spring we planted around over 400 watermelon plants thinking that based on past seasons this was way more than we’d ever need. People like watermelons and they ripen around the time tomatoes ripen. So our thinking was if the tomatoes get hit with late blight we’d have the watermelons to fall back on. The plan worked perfectly, except for the watermelon part. As I mentioned above the tomatoes got hit by late blight so step one is complete. Now we just needed the watermelons to pull through. But no. When we walked through the melon patch last week we were only able to find around 35 watermelons. I’m not sure why they didn’t produce this season, could be the cool weather, could be something else completely. In past years we had enough to feed all our members plus the crows without any problem. This season the crows left them alone – probably had enough to drink elsewhere – yet the plants decided to take the season off. Nuts.
So our dilemma: we have 35 melon and 145 members. What to do? We brainstormed for a good minute or two on how to distribute them in the most equitable way. Here are the ideas we came up with:
- Some type of game of chance say picking cards or drawing numbers
- Renew for next season get a melon!
- Watermelon seed spitting contest
- Arm wrestling
- Bean weight contest. You get one pull from the bean bin to get exactly one pound of beans. Those who succeed get a melon.
- Donate them all to the food shelf
- Volunteer on the farm this week and get a melon.
- Mud wrestle. Winner gets a melon.
- Launch the melons with Alex’s trebuchet. Catch a melon and it’s yours!
All of these approaches have some merit but we can’t do them all since we don’t have enough melons. Plus none of them is necessarily equitable. So we decided to look at our membership and realized that we have about as many good melons as we have FamilyShares. So we decided to give them to our FamilyShare members. We’re sorry others won’t get a watermelon this year. Hopefully next year will be a better melon year.
What will we have this week? Potatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, garlic, kale, cabbage, some chard, some beans, some cucumbers, some tomatillos, some tomatoes, some cherry tomatoes, and some type of herbs.
FruitShare this week is a mixed box including peaches, apples, pluots and grapes.
CheeseShare and EggShare are this week.
MeatShare comes Friday.
SeafoodShare and SalmonShare arrived last week. Pick-up your seafood if you haven’t already.