A couple of word on some of the things we are giving out this week followed by this week’s Farm News!
Just a quick word on cauliflower. We’ve noticed over the many years that cauliflower seems particularly susceptible to problems that cause the head to degrade after harvest. We’ve taken various steps to try to mitigate the problems with reasonable success. However the heads could still have issues. So I suggest if you get a cauliflower that you use it as soon as possible. I’d even suggest using it the day you get it. Now it may not degrade if you don’t but I suspect it will have less of a chance to degrade if you eat it right away. Or maybe it will degrade but by your consumption of it rather than something else’s.
A quick word on tomatoes. This season we are trying to get to all the cherry tomatoes and tomatoes before they get overripe and fall off the plant. So we are picking them at the “breaker” stage if possible. This is the stage where the tomato starts to turn its final color. At the breaker stage the tomato is essentially cut off from its mother plant and no longer receives nutrients. It has everything it needs to become a delicious, nutritious tomato. Since tomatoes are climacteric they will continue to ripen off the vine.By picking them at the breaker stage we get better, longer lasting tomatoes than if we waited until they are fully ripe and eaten by the mice. So be aware that many of the tomatoes you receive will not be fully ripe yet. How do you tell when they are ripe? The riper the tomato the more squishy it is. So keep gently squeezing it until it is as ripe as you want it. Well, don’t continuously squeeze it. Just give it a squeeze ever day or two until it is perfect!
A quick word on beans. We don’t wash beans. We’ve found that if we put wet beans in the cooler they rot fairly quickly. So we just don’t wash them. You may notice that the bean you get are dirty. We suggest you wash them just prior to cooking them. That way you won’t have moldy beans in your fridge either.
Farm News
Let’s continue our tour around the farm. Today we head to the Southwest field. This is our largest field and this season it is quite diverse. This season in this field, much like every season in this field, are the perennial crops of flowers and herbs. Their perenialness requires them to not move around every year. In between the two we have the cucurbits — e.g. squash, zucchini (which is a type of squash), pumpkins, cucumbers, gourds, melons and watermelons. These crops are our largest consumer of land by area. Corn and nightshades with the potatoes are a close second/third. These plants tend to be quite large and cover a lot of ground with their vines. The squash/pumpkins are great competitors to weeds. The melons and cucumbers less so. With their vining habit, once they grow past the edge of the black plastic we can no longer cultivate them at which point they are on their own. Most other crops reach a similar point but typically due to height not width.
Our main pest problems with these crops various based on the crop. For the squash it is typically squash bugs and cucumber beetles. As long as the plants are healthy they can typically outgrown these pests. Occasionally we spray with an organic pesticide to kill the squash bug nymphs and some of the cucumber beetles but we have no pesticide that kills adult squash bugs. Since squash bugs overwinter here in Minnesota we try to eliminate them in the fall prior to their finding a winter home. We do this by “flaming” them. Yes, we walk around the field with a blow torch and burn the $^&$^%&& out of them. It’s quite cathartic really. The bugs tend to sun themselves on old, rotting squash or pumpkins which gives us a great concentration of pests to kill quickly. The more we kill in the fall the fewer there are to reproduce in the spring and the less problem they become the following season. It’s a win-win!
Out main pest for the melons are deer and crows. Both like to eat parts of melons never finishing them before they move onto another melon — probably because the melons aren’t ripe when they first start eating them. For crows we can setup strings over the plants using hoops to hold the strings above the crop. Crows do not like to be where they can’t immediately fly away — I guess they don’t like to walk out of danger. Since the strings prevent them from flying they won’t walk under them and therefor don’t eat the melons. This works really well until the deer saunter through and drag the strings and hoops all akimbo. Then not only are the melon susceptible to crows again but we have to detangle the strings and hoops and do this while being angry about it all working yet not working. These deer and crows are in cahoots I say, cahoots!
This year the deer have also eaten many of our cucumber plants. The first planting of cukes survived pretty well as can be determined from the overwhelming number of cukes we are giving out this year. We attribute this success to spraying fish emulsion on the plants to deter the deer grazing. We didn’t find the time to effectively fish the second planting of cukes and the results are quite striking. Many of the plants are eaten to the ground and few are actually going to produce any fruits. I suppose this could be a blessing in disguise since we’ve had so many cukes already this year.
Moving on, also in this bed are our “assortment” category — things like celery, celeriac, fennel, chard, lettuce, hot peppers, sweet potatoes, annual flowers and annual herbs. These crops are not part of a large group of crops like the nightshades or cucurbits so we tend to plant them wherever we have room. Since they are grown on plastic with drip we like to keep them in areas that also use plastic and drip so this year they are with the cucurbits.
Deer again are the primary pest for these crops. We cover the chard and lettuce with plastic mesh suspended over the crop using hoops made of electrical conduit. It seems to work quite well. I suppose the deer have plenty of other things to eat so they don’t try getting under the mesh even though I suspect they would not have a problem doing so. Surprisingly, at least to me, the deer seem to really like gladiolus and sunflowers. We don’t have a solution to either other than giving them plenty of melons to eat. Even then we still lose many of these to deer as they await the melons to size up for easier consumption.
We plant the hot peppers with the herbs instead of the sweet peppers for one very important reason — cross pollination. We found in past seasons, if we plant the hot peppers near the sweet peppers we get some hot sweet peppers. Now I think that would be great but some members of the farm don’t appreciate it as much as I do. So we separate them and hope the bees stick to one or the other when out foraging.
I think that about covers the southwest section. On to the southeast next week!
What will we have this week?
Cucumbers, zucchini, onions, some eggplant, cauliflower, cabbage, some tomatoes, some cherry tomatoes, some broccoli, the remaining kohlrabi, some beets, carrots!, some beans, green onions, a few more melons, some snow peas, a bit of kale, just a couple heads of lettuce, pickling cukes, some tomatillos, some sweet corn, and of course all the things I have forgotten.
We have ‘Shrooms and Flowers this week.
Sorry no recipe. No time. (But we will have thyme!)
Joke of the Week
Why was Frosty inspecting the carrots at the grocery store?
He was picking his nose.
Feel free to send in questions, comments, jokes, etc.