A couple of announcements then on to farm news.
This Saturday is our annual Garlic Planting Gala! This is a great opportunity to meet your fellow farm friends, learn a bit about farming and see where your food is grown! There are opportunities for all ages and abilities. Those who can stoop, crawl or slither can plant the cloves. Those who are more of an upright persuasion can pop the garlic bulbs into cloves while standing or sitting! Start time is 1:00. End time depends on how fast we work (and how much help we get!) The weather forecasts have been consistently inconsistent. Be aware that we may postpone this event so check the web site before coming out. Let me know if you can make it! And for more emphasis here is another exclamation point!
We are taking reservations/orders for 2022 veggies. You can either send/bring in the $100 deposit or order through our online store. We’d love to see all of you back for 2022.
We’re still taking back the cherry tomato clam shells. Feel free to bring them to the farm or put them in your delivery tote. No reason to throw more trash in a landfill.
Four more weeks, including this one, left in the season. Please plan appropriately.
Farm News
As farming seasons go, I have to believe this is the most atypical one so far. In a typical year we have frost sometime in the month of September. If the current weather forecast holds true we won’t have a frost this month. Which is a good thing. Without a frost our warm season crops continue to grow, not as fast as in the summer due to the lack of sunlight but still quite a bonus! For example, the tomato plants in the hoop house are reaching the top of the structure! That’s about 16 feet tall!
However not having frost has a detrimental effect on other crops. For example, Brussels sprouts and carrots sweeten after a frost. And more importantly, many of the pests we see perish in a frost. One in particular we are now still seeing are cabbage worms (which aren’t worms but caterpillars). If we had a frost many if not all of these would perish but without a frost we find them lurking in our fall broccoli. There are a couple of things we do to limit your exposure to these pest. First, we use an organic pesticide — a bacteria — that when ingested makes these very hungry caterpillars have very bad tummy aches. These tummy aches cause the worms to eventually die. It doesn’t affect humans and is easily washed off during our second thing we do, which is we put the harvested heads into the wash tank and let them soak for a few hours. This drowns most of the cabbage worms that failed to eat the bacteria or that somehow survived its ingestion. Though this works reasonably well there are still a few that get through the process and end up in the broccoli we give out. This is a long winded caution to not be freaked out if you find a cabbage worm on your broccoli. We feel the few that get through are less detrimental to our health than using a toxic pesticide.
Speaking of pest, one of our “projects” this time of year is to reduce the number of squash bugs that find a warm place to survive the winter. The fewer that survive the fewer we have to deal with next season. I believe I mentioned this in the past but might as well mention it again. After we harvest the squash we go through the squash field and “flame” the squash bugs. We take a propane torch and cook the squash bugs as they sunbathe on the (numerous) left behind squash. We do it a few times over the course of the fall season since not all the squash are sunbathing at the same time. This year we seem to have a lot of squash bugs. Flaming them after the squash year we’ve had is extremely cathartic.
Speaking of squash, lets not speak of it again. Instead lets speak about potatoes! One benefit of the CSA style of farming is that each season some veggies do well and some do poorly and the rest are somewhere in the middle. This year our potatoes performed remarkably well. We are getting more than a ten-fold return. So for every pound of seed potatoes we planted we’ve harvested more the ten pounds! So instead of many weeks of the vegetable that must not be named we will have many weeks of potatoes. This week we are giving out a russet potato called Norkotah. The Idaho Potato Commission describes it as “A mild potato flavor with a soft texture and moderate density. Tends to bake up creamy and moist, not grainy. Moderately chewy skin. White to pale yellow interior. Medium specific gravity.” If that doesn’t make your mouth water…
What will we have this week?
Potatoes of course! We’ll also have onions (any yellow onions you get from us from now on will be storage onions and are pretty strong if eaten raw), garlic, peppers, carrots, some tomatoes, some tomatillos, a few cherry tomatoes, a few Napa cabbages, some broccoli, some eggplants, some kohlrabi, some okra, lots of hot peppers, some chard, and probably some herbs of various types. Oh, oh, oh, and daikon radishes! How can I forget the daikon radishes?
It is a Fruit, Egg, ‘Shroom, Jam and Flower week. We may also have some of the WinterShare items available depending on how much time we have this week to put them together.
Speaking of Flowers, our ornamental pumpkins have all rotted with the same affliction as our vegetable that must not be named so unfortunately we will not be giving out pumpkins with FlowerShare this year. However we are giving out many more weeks of flowers due to the lack of frost, so that’s a plus!
Speaking of Jam, we are giving out both Septembers and Octobers jam this week. The Amish were low on peach jam so those who ordered peach may or may not get it depending on where the few jars end up. We got blueberry as a replacement. I hope this works for you.
I think that is more than enough for this week. As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, etc. Or better yet, bring them out to the garlic planting and deliver them in person! And be sure to check the web site before you come out.