This is a good week for a corn feed! Please plan accordingly.
The onions are at a stage where washing them prior to giving them out would be worse than giving them out kind of dirty. So we probably won’t wash them anymore.
Speaking of onions, they are also at the stage where we can harvest the rest and cure them in the greenhouse. If anyone is interested in harvesting onions do not suppress the urge and find your way out here to lend a hand.
We still have about a third of the garlic left to process. For those of you who like to farm by sitting in a comfy folding chair (please see above picture) while listening to your favorite podcast or talking with your fellow farmers, please consider coming out for an hour or two and do just that while cutting the tops off the garlic bulbs!
Speaking of processing garlic, we had a group of great workers from Rise come out and lend a hand on Friday. Sam, Shawn, Stephanie and Zack, as well as Talia their Support Professional, came out Friday and helped weed the lettuce mix, harvested a bunch of onions and then spent an hour or two processing the garlic! It was a great day of fun and laughter with a great group of wonderful people. “Rise unlocks potential and opens doors to success for people with disabilities or other challenges through creative solutions and customized support.” If you are looking for an organization that helps people who are experiencing difficult life challenges consider donating some of your hard-earned cash to Rise to make other’s lives better.
If you get a honeydew melon — these are smooth skin, pale green/light yellow color — be aware that as far as we can tell they are not climacteric. This means the melon will not ripen once harvested. The literature seems to indicate that most if not all honeydews are not climacteric so it confirms what we suspect. I don’t know why seed companies do not publish such information nor do they publish information on how to tell if the melon is ripe. Since this is our first year growing this melon we did our best to try to figure these things out prior to harvesting and dispersing them. So you may or may not receive a good honeydew. Let us know how we did.
And finally, as always, we are still looking for an additional employee, especially the week of August 28th.
Farm News
Let’s move on to the last field in our virtual farm tour — the southeast field. Over the years the southeast field has hosted all of the different plants we grow. That’s also true of all our other fields; I just failed to mention it before. They have all hosted all the different plants because we rotate the crops each season so that no crop is grown in the same field in less than a four year interval. The purpose of rotation is multi-fold. First and foremost, by rotating the crops, diseases that are particular to a given crop do not have a host to grow on if that crop is no longer grown in that field. By rotating we remove the host for a period of time (3-4 years or more) thus giving time for the pathogen to diminish and hopefully die a painful, horrible death — or at least go away. If we grew the same crop consecutively in a given field the pathogen would reproduce and accumulate in increasing amounts and therefore negatively affect future generations of that crop. So wisely, we don’t do that. Unfortunately many of the pathogens affect many different crops so it isn’t a complete solution but it gives enough benefit to make the minor inconvenience of rotation worthwhile.
The other benefit of crop rotation is for weed management. Different crops have different life cycles. So by rotating crop we can break the weed cycles in each of the fields. For example, if we grow something like peas in a field one year since they have a short lifespan we can till under the crop and plant another crop or a cover crop in that place. Any weed that needs a longer time to produce seeds won’t have time to reproduce so we reduce the weed seed bank of that weed. If we plant a long term crop with a large leaf canopy like winter squash we can reduce the number of weeds that eventually go to seed since the squash plants can effectively compete with the weeds. But with squash, once they vine into the aisle we can no longer use the tractor for cultivation so there can be weeds that survive and succeed under the squash plants. Then there are crops we plant later in the season like beans and fall broccoli. This later planting is frequently done after many of the spring seeds no longer germinate. So this breaks the spring weed cycle. By rotating crops that each break the cycle in different ways we can have some effect on the future weed seed bank, though to be honest we still have many weeds.
This year in the southeast we have all our crops that use overhead irrigation. These are most but not all of the crops we direct seed plus the corn. Why do we not use drip tape on these crops? Good question. I suspect it is inertia. Since we’ve always done it this way we will continue to do it this way. Plus we have the sprinklers so we should use them. In the case of corn it is probably marginally more efficient to use drip but the cost of the drip tape, the cost of installation and the cost to remove the tape is a bit much for the amount of corn the deer and raccoons leave behind. Plus the planting scheme we use for corn wouldn’t work well with our drip tape layer. The corn rows are planted too far apart to fit two rows on a bed. So by planting it on flat ground and using overhead we can fit more corn in a smaller area.
The other crops we direct seed in this field are peas, beans, and some herbs like cilantro and dill. These crops are planted pretty densely — four rows per bed — so overhead irrigation works well to ensure each row in each bed gets sufficient water. Again if we tried using drip tape the drip tape layer bed size would reduce the number of rows we could plant in a bed to just three so we’d have to use more land to grow the same amount of these crops. Carrots used to be in this category but we switched to planting them on drip last season. Having the increased bed height the drip tape layer makes creates better, longer and more easily dug carrots. A few years ago we dropped the number of rows per bed of carrots to three so we could use our undercutter to help in the harvest. We also switched our radishes to drip last season. Drip gave us the ability to water them more frequently than we’d like to run the sprinklers so the radishes came out better on drip.
This season the deer have had a hankering for the beans and peas and corn. The fish emulsion experiment worked reasonably well but not perfectly and is time consuming to implement. Plus it negatively affected the bean plants. So we have short bean plants with more dirty beans due to the reduced leaf canopy. Raccoons and birds are also big fans of sweet corn. You can typically tell when a raccoon has been around because the corn field looks like it had hosted a party of drunken corn lovers. They make a mess by pulling down the stalks and eating whatever they feel is theirs to consume. Deer typically bite off the top of the ear. Birds turn the husks of the ears into a shredded mess. I think their are only two solutions to protecting corn from all three predators: 1) Grow corn inside a big, pest proof bubble, or 2) Grow enough corn so every pest is satisfied. Neither approach is cost-effective.
The other pest of corn is corn earworms. These are the larva of moths that lay their eggs on the corn silk. The eggs hatch and the larva consumes the ripening corn kernels. Earworms are difficult to control because they are hidden inside the husk so they are not very susceptible to pesticides. One could walk through all the corn with an eye-dropper or similar tool and drop some BT (a bacteria that kills caterpillars) in each of the corn silks but I’m far too lazy to do that. Plus who has the time? So we hope we don’t get inundated with corn earworms and if we do find them we warn you that there might be some in your corn. Oh, by the way, there might be some corn earworms in your corn. If you find them just cut off the damaged part and eat the rest. It their presence bothers you please accept our apologies. We’d rather find a few pests in our produce than eat toxic chemicals.
What will we have this week?
Corn! This variety tends to be less sweet and more corny. We like it because it has a tight husk that reduces the incidence of earworms. Plus it seems the deer and raccoons like it less than the last corn.
What else will we have this week?
Fennel, beans, onions, garlic (Thanks friends from Rise!), tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, some tomatillos, eggplants, cucumbers, zucchini, some melons, some cauliflowers, some broccoli, the last of the snow peas, and all the other things I’ve forgotten.
It is an egg and flower week.
Recipe of the Week
One thing I have been trying to provide over the many years are the ingredients for making tabouli. I think we have finally accomplished this task this week. So here is a recipe you can use with the ingredients we provide. I think the white onions we give out this week would be better than the green onions the recipe calls for mainly because the white onions are sweeter and less pungent. But that is a personal preference I suppose.
If you don’t want to use the parsley for tabouli maybe you can use it with the fennel and green beans in this recipe, Green Bean & Roasted Fennel Salad.
Finally, since we have courgettes, aubergine and fennel, maybe a ratatouille recipe is in order! Of course if you use courgettes and aubergines you’ll need to cook it using Celsius.
Joke of the Week
What does a farmer call his corn planting?
A stalk investment.
As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, jokes, brain teasers, etc.