A some quick announcements then on to farm news.
We have a couple of large projects that involve sitting down and exercising your gripping muscles — cutting the tops off the garlic and the onions. If anyone wants to come out and get a grip please contact me and let me know your availability. No experience necessary.
We also have opportunities to get dirty and harvest stuff. There are still half the onions to get in from the field. We have somewhere around 15 rows of potatoes and seven rows of carrots. We will be working on these projects every Tuesday and Thursday (our non-pickup days) so if you’d like to get out of the house and help out do not hesitate to do so. We can also look at a weekend project day if there is interest. Let me know if you are coming out or would like to help on the weekend so I can plan accordingly.
Farm News
This summer there has been a lot of blood, sweat and tears here on the farm. The high heat and humidity are of course the cause of the sweat — a lot of sweat. I never realized what a great sweater I was until this summer. The tears come from the onions we’ve been harvesting. And the blood? The hoards of mosquitoes at all hours of the day attacking every part of our bodies as we try to reach the first cucumber of the morning or the last tomato in the afternoon. It has been horrible. Typically we don’t have mosquito problems during the day; they seemed to come out only near dawn or dusk. But this season they are out 24/7.
Rebecca wondered where the bats were; we saw one hanging out in the wash area earlier this month. I speculated they were overweight and unable to fly due to the large quantity of flamin’ hot mosquitoes® they’ve been snacking on this summer. I can imagine them sitting in front of the TV burping up mosquito legs and licking cheese dust off their winged fingers as their distended stomachs expand outside of their promotional batman t-shirts. We need them to get off their fat bat-asses and eat more mosquitoes! Until then we are testing the ability of mosquito repellent and feeding the mosquitoes that are not repelled.
Of course if this Argiope aurantia was more successful that would help too!
What will we have this coming week? Well the tomatoes and cherry tomatoes are still going strong. The eggplants are finally slowing down (I think). The peppers are going strong. As are the beets. We’ll try to get another round of carrots dug on Tuesday. We have plenty of onions and plenty of garlic (as long as we can get some of it processed). The cucumbers are slowing though I hope they continue at a reasonable rate until the frost. There are watermelons out there and we will harvest them as they ripen. The okra is going well. Who wants more okra? As are the tomatillos. The sweet corn is done. Oh, and the beans are still coming on strong.
We still have WinterShares available. Our WinterShare is a bunch of produce that is easy to store: 20# of potatoes, 20# of winter squash, 10# of storage onions, 2# of garlic and 2# of shallots. It is delivered during the fall to your pick-up location. A full share is $95. Half share is $50. If you would like to order one please let me know or go to our online store to order and pay.
FruitShare comes this week. We can get more Colorado peaches. Please let me know by 5:00 pm Monday if you’d like peaches.
We have a special Artisan BreadShare this week — Rosemary peppercorn Baguettes with rosemary from the farm! We were supposed to have roasted garlic sourdough with garlic from the farm last week but everyone involved forgot. So we are sending garlic (along with the rosemary) to Bread Art this week for them to make into garlic sourdough bread in a couple weeks.
CheeseShare and EggShare are this week.
FlowerShare is still going on though many of the flower varieties have petered out. We’ll do our best to get you nice bouquets though they may be smaller than what they were during the peak of summer.
No Seafood, Salmon, Meat, Coffee, or Ice Cream this week.
InsectShare this week is Flamin’ Hot Mosquitoes!
As always, keep flooding my inbox with questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, jokes, brain teasers and insect related food items!